Some truths are only known by inversion, by negation and through a proof by contradiction. Alan Turing's proof of the undecidability of non-trivially complex algorithms, that is - the impossibility of analysis to arrive at certainty concerning whether a given computer program will terminate or continue forever, was just such a proof. Kurt Gödel's proof…
The image in the mirror is the machine…
Observe how the image in the mirror of all of our aspirational self-definitions is the machine, logic, the structured and ordered grammar of a game, a recurring pattern and design or, most overtly in our globally interdependent information and communications networks: an algorithmic sequence. The fantasy of truth, of certainty (beyond that which can be…
You are not your own…
You are not your self, your own possession and private labyrinth of interior significance and reflective surfaces. Neither are you in any sense, shape or form "owned" or prescriptively and unambiguously defined by any external realm or anchor of reflexive cultural necessity. You, and I, and the whole world are not the endpoints or causal…
On not knowing the names of things (and other absences)…
It is not just what is said that matters, but also - the way in which it is said, the nuance, the poetry and the subtlety. This is the second-order semantics of meaning and style in communication and thought.It is not enough to simply know the names of things, the measures and to collect the…
Digital Transformation and Cultural Bottlenecks
Organisations are information and energy-processing systems. Information and energy-processing systems are autonomously oriented (via physics, logic, mathematics) towards low energy states. This orientation or endemic systems -bias towards low energy states bridges inanimate and living systems but may be considered to have obtained a special status in living systems.The differentiator of life in this context…
The Shadows of Entropy
It is a truth almost universally known but rarely, if ever, acknowledged that the strengths and the values of our world are simultaneously its weakness and qualitative (as much as quantitative) poverty. Contemporary communications systems have, for instance, been truly wonderous - they have brought us all closer together through near-instaneous text, voice and video…
Slavery
It is a beautiful, tragic irony that the most powerful symbol against slavery might be that of the stone slave, themselves eternally imprisoned in time and matter. There is something in this: the symbol creates and represents what it detests; minds (and cultures) create their own unwitting blind-spots in this way. Slavery is of course…
Encoding Culture, Encrypting Identity
Conjecture: We are encoding culture but we are encrypting identity. It is not well-understood - partially because those procedural mechanisms and autonomously self-propagating waveforms (or functions) of patterned information that manifest as, in and through ourselves must also protect themselves and their own aspirational continuity. If it were immediately apparent how mental worlds and cultural…
The Temptation of Anonymity
The temptation of anonymity (in an age of relentlessly depersonalising self-expression) is to not commit a record of one's own living trajectory into the biosphere and information networks of our era. It is of course a fallacy and rank impossibility - there is no identity camouflage or stealth technology. Self-identity was always a matter of…
On Mechanism, Holism and (an) Organisational Logic of Life
On mechanism and holism: we often enough mistake the discrete, bounded artefacts with which we are presented as being the reality and substance of this world when it is the immaterial abstractions and a matrix of interdependence and representational cross-reference between them which is the true reality. This is where a "logic of life" manifests…
Reality Inversion: The Emptiness in Art
"Reality" is a subtle concept. An artist creates an artefact, a fact, a reality through the skillful convergence of other facts. Those other references and earlier, representational facts were similarly composed of other, earlier facts. This is how our minds (and cultures) endlessly rebuild this world. In this way - we often mistake the discrete,…
Libraries are Mirrors
This city... the morning sun rises as though summoned by the gently floating hot air balloons and here, the National Library of Australia is so wonderfully, poetically framed in representational space. This architecture - like some ancient Greek monument to a memory of the Gods and their dramas; but the only theatre here is that…
